


good brutality

by saturnsage



Category: Fallen Hero Series - Malin Rydén
Genre: F/F
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-04-09
Updated: 2019-04-09
Packaged: 2020-01-07 12:16:11
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,484
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18410456
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/saturnsage/pseuds/saturnsage
Summary: Agnes holds a cigar like a pacifier.Nana holds a cigarette like it's dirty.Either way, Mortum knows they're one in the same.





	good brutality

**Author's Note:**

> im all about the wlw now

It began with her shoving down her lab coat to her forearms and touching copper wires with the consistency of spinal fluid with her bare hands. They burned afterward, but she’s never met someone with soft hands in this work; the pale under-belly of where everyone turns nocturnal and phantasmal.   
  
She focuses on making things smaller- smaller mass-space, smaller chance of capture, smaller chance of getting caught looking at her employer’s employee.  
  
The woman in question -aged Grecian curls piled on top of the elegant slope of neck- crosses her legs and raises eyebrows –dark and brooding- at her.   
  
“Doctor,” the client lilts, and the fact Mortum’s containing live wires with her own two hands have nothing to do with the shivers that come up to the base of her skull, “I did not think of you as one of the easily distracted.”

“I cannot help but wonder where on earth you came from,” Mortum replies breezily, hands twisting gears and wires together in a formula incomprehensible to everyone save only for her.  “Surely,  _cheri_ , it would be a…hm… A blasphemy in the very least, to call you human. Angelic, perhaps? Although, to be fair, there are no angels left here in Los Diablos. A demon, then.”   
  
To Mortum’s liquid satisfaction, the client laughs. It’s low and rocking, like the crooners of old jazz, the same flavor as tree sap turned to syrup. A dark blush painting the tip of her brown cheeks, (oh? Is she not used to compliments?) She presses tapered fingers to her collarbones.

Mortum has never met anyone with soft hands in this business, and yet.

How soft those hands are. They hold a bargain and a contract well.  
  
“I don’t think that I would like being anything but human,” The client says, mirthful. There’s an edge of something that Mortum can’t pick up, since her eyes are too stormy in their blue for the doctor to truly read through the lines, “The spectrum of humanity is too complex to fake.”

* * *

  
Her name is Agnes. No last names, because last names are tokens for cheap nooses. No middle names, either. Just Agnes.   
  
Just Agnes who loves money and the color of the strobe lights on her skin a little too much, who calls Mortum things like ‘ _good docto_ r’, like ‘ _my friend_ ’, like ‘ _fascinating_ ’.   
  
Mortum, a scientist who loves money and the taste of praise a little too much to save her own ego from flaring up under the attention.

They are extravagant together, and Mortum curses Agnes’ employer every night before bed. Fuck them for putting Agnes into the Venn diagram, fuck them for putting the carat jewel of her in front of Mortum and expecting it to be business-only.  
  
Mortum plans out the suit with Agnes in mind, and creates a monster.  
  
The spectrum of humanity is indeed to complex to fake, but with the way Agnes eyes her polished nails when she said that, and looked at the doctor, it was almost hinted she was one who did not usually believe her own words.   
  
Thus, Mortum builds a suit with the complexity of the human spectrum in mind, and it is eidolic in its ability to make one’s knee buckle. It is every sleep-paralysis nightmare that tucks you in at bed as your arms are strapped down by fear. It is Agnes when she dresses in the blue dress, to match the sapphires nestled on her chest. It is Agnes when she kissed Mortum’s cheek, right as Mortum pressed a gun to her temple. It is Agnes with her boneless gait, Agnes with the way she stares, Agnes with the holes in her tights, Agnes with the way she speaks as if she forces puzzle pieces together.   
  
Agnes when she enters Joes, and suddenly the hardwood feels splintered in Mortum’s black loafers. Agnes, who knows, and doesn’t know.

Mortum holds the gun still after Agnes had given back to her earlier, and the trigger burns with where Agnes had touched it.   
  
She looks like someone who would hurt her friends. Mortum kisses the gun, before setting it down on the tabletop to continue to work.

* * *

“I like to be eccentric in my simplicity. Truth is brutal when it is objective, so why should I not be as well?”   
  
Mortum hums, and abandons sipping her drink to instead watch as Agnes taps her fingers again and again on the table. One of her sleeves is slipping down. The urge to use the excuse to see how cream-textured her skin could be under Mortum’s calloused hands is one that is nigh impossible to hold in.   
  
“Is that your goal in life? To be truthful?” She asks, loving the way the other girl blinks in surprise, doe eyes clear in their illegibility.

  
“Huh. I haven’t thought of that before.” Agnes says. Then, she grins. It’s a lopsided smile, teeth as perfect as a horror movie. Mortum shivers under her turtleneck. “Maybe you’re right. There’s so many little truths out there, and none of them are the right kind.”   
  
“What’s the right kind,  _mon ani_? Is it the one where you walk into my life and make me question the lines I have set myself?”   
  
“The right kind,” Agnes says. The grin turns perverse. The expression on her cherubic face glows with its blacked-out poetry of emotions. “Is the one that hurts.”  
  
Mortum goes home then, and thinks about objective truth, the consumption of lies and the co-dependency of two mouths saying the same thing.    
  
The villain suit is designed off of the  _Centrolenidae,_ a frog whose skin is transparent enough to show the inner workings. Apparently, Agnes’ employer shares the same taste as Agnes does. It is appalling with how grotesque it will be, and perhaps truth is showing the grotesque, the inner workings.   
  
There are highlights of orange on the cape in some pattern Mortum knows better to think is random.   
  
She sinks lower into the bathtub, and thinks about how Agnes walking into her life and waltzing into her dreams is anything but random.   
  
It makes a scientist prone to believe in superstition. 

* * *

(Second Plague comes in, wearing Mortum’s work, and nearly kills the Rangers, and nearly kills Agnes. )

When she convinces Agnes with her chandelier attention span to come with the gala with her, the way Agnes drops after the first bomb blows reminds Mortum of a dead body.   
  
She is so still in Mortum’s arms, and completely silent.   
  
Just a few minutes ago, she press wine-purple lips against Mortum’s, and they kissed sloppy enough to stain each other’s silk lapels,  to frizz out each other’s hair.   
  
Agnes sleeps like she kisses, and she kisses like she can’t tell if she’s lying.   
  
For someone who loves honesty, Mortum and Agnes have enough secrets and white-lies between the other to fill a black-hole with peanut packaging.   
  
The ambulance does nothing to stop her from looking like an Ophelia in sleep. The bruises on her face look as if they were part of her skin; all ethereal, all inhumane, all poisonous.   
  
Mortum kisses her earlobe.   
  
“What exactly are you hiding, lover?” She asks.   
  
Agnes doesn’t respond.

* * *

Her lips are puckered when she takes a long, damning drag from the cigarette. Mortum stares at her, holding her own snake-bite kiss: a bottle of carbon it-will-kill-you-cide. 

“Did you make me fall in love with you?”   
  
The cigarette glows as an evil-eye, and Nana’s eyes glow with it.

She pulls away the stick and blows. The smoke mixes right into the grey fog of the beach, and theres sand specks on her un-brushed hair. The only sleek thing about her is her lip-gloss, her cheekbones, the tap to get rid of the ash on her cigarette.

  
“Do you think I did?” She asks, crackling like a VHS tape full of Ella Fitzgerald songs.   
  
Mortum taps the bottle in her hands. She looks down at the sand and thinks about things like scientific papers with her name written in the wrong tone and how once she used to be the one doing these things. The- you know. The heart break. Maybe not this kind, but a heart break is still a  splicing of the four chambers no matter which meat-pounder you use.

“Maybe. I wouldn’t be surprised. I don’t know.”   
  
She looks up again, and sees Nana’s eyes blazing coal-black on fire.   
  
Nana’s lips turn into a bitter, plaster smile.   
  
“Well, then. That says it all.” Nana says. Phonogram scratched off. “Because which one of us here can control what the other thinks?”  
  
“Is she even real?” Mortum asks.   
  
“I don’t lie.” Nana says.  There’s no edge that can’t be read. She’s as glassy as the frogs that show off their intestines.   
  
Mortum kisses her, and the right kind of honesty in a kiss is the one where it hurts, so Mortum bites Nana’s lips and makes it hurt, so, so much.

 

 


End file.
